The present invention relates to surface gauges and, more particularly, to an improved apparatus and method for measuring concrete surface heights.
In recent years, the concrete floor industry has experienced an increasing demand for extremely flat floors (genericly known as superflat floors) suitable for automated high level warehousing applications wherein floor surface height deviations often cause vibrational damage to automated fork and turret trucks traveling upon the floor and pose reduced productivity to stacking cranes installed within the warehouse. To meet this increasing demand, the industry is currently attempting to adopt standards and specifications for floor flatness as well as establish apparatus and methods suitable for measuring floor flatness to insure compliance of such existing and future standards.
Heretofore, two basic categories of prior art apparatus and methods for measuring floor flatness have been utilized in the art, i.e. manual systems and semi-automatic systems. The manual systems have typically comprised either an engineer's level and rod apparatus or a level straight edge with scales mounted to the straight edge at right angles; whereby floor measurements indicated on the rod or from the scales could be obtained and manually plotted. The more recent semi-automatic systems have generally comprised apparatus having a pair of spaced wheels adapted to travel along a selective path of a concrete floor surface and including a sensor adapted to measure the height differential between the two wheels along the concrete floor. Examples of such prior art semi-automatic systems are the Analog Profileograph.TM. apparatus manufactured by Edward W. Face Company and an analog measuring apparatus manufactured by Mr. Ralph McLean of Fullerton, Calif.
Although such prior art manual and semi-automatic measuring systems have proven generally effective in the past, they possess inherent deficiencies which detract from their overall effectiveness and widespread use in the industry.
In relation to the manual prior art systems, the foremost deficiency has been the extreme labor intensiveness of conducting measurements, often requiring a pair of skilled surveyors to be maintained upon the job site for prolong duration. Further, such manual systems, although providing a true height reading along the floor surface, have necessitated the accumulation of height readings at only selected locations on the floor surface, with later interpolation of the measurement data to derive a height profile for the entire surface area of the floor. As will be recognized, such interpolation inherently introduces inaccuracies into the measurement results which in superflat floor applications is oftentimes unacceptable. The prior art semi-automatic systems, although typically not requiring significant interpolation of data results, have proven to be extremely expensive and, further, have additionally required skilled operating technicians to be utilized upon the job site. Further, such semi-automatic systems have heretofore failed to provide a true height profile of the floor surface, but rather have only yielded a relative height differential throughout the surface area of the floor. Likewise, current semi-automatic devices pose many anomalies associated with the data representation of absolute surface heights. In addition, such systems have similarly failed to permit the slope or level measurements of the floor to be determined.
Thus, there exists a substantial need in the art for an improved measurement apparatus and method for measuring surface heights which automatically provides accurate, true height profile and slope data for concrete floor surfaces without the need of utilizing skilled labor.